Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian Salvaged

Two moments of the legend share this little panel. In one, the physician brothers Cosmas and Damian, bound and thrown into the sea on the orders of the proconsul Lysias, are rescued by an angel who frees them and brings them back to shore. In the other, Lysias himself has been seized by demons, and the brothers he wanted drowned drive the demons out of him. Showing two events side by side within one frame was an old way of telling a story, and Fra Angelico uses it to keep the legend moving along the strip of scenes he painted around 1438 to 1440 beneath the high altar of San Marco in Florence. The museum's own title for the panel names both episodes. It was bought for the collection of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1822.